Umbrism believes that there is too much communication in poetry. (You want data, read a news blog.) Poems should be crazed incantations. It is magic that we look for in poetry; magic's what our lives so desperately lack that we fall for the first cheap charlatan who promises it. We demand real magic, with real toads. UMBRISM IS THE RAINDANCE FOR OOBLECH.

The original Umbrist. "...each book written in a different voice, different style, includes songs, performance scores, vispo, typography, found, texts & anti-texts."

24 March 2006

Runny lent to the wibraryAnd there were bundreds of hooks--Bistory hooks, beography gooks,And lots of bory stooks.He looked them over one by oneAnd guess which one he took--A bience stook? A boetry pook?Oh, no--a bomic cook!"

20 March 2006

18 March 2006

"Lyn Hejinian, in her essay, "Barbarism," writes about poetry as a border practice, and that the border is in fact in the center, not some dejected margin, an interstitial, "between" space. She goes on to productively (in the Althusserian sense, if I'm getting it right) read Adorno's famous line about the impossibility/barbarity of (lyric) poetry after Auschwitz as an imperative to write "barbaric" poetry, recalling the etymology of the word in an onomatopoeic formulation of babble, as it was used to designate foreigners who couldn't speak properly (i.e., didn't speak Greek). Adorno himself privileges the incomprehensibilty of Modernist art as the cite of its "political" resistance."

08 March 2006

07 March 2006

"arrives at untreatable

arrives at untreatablelaughter first of all is soluble sosensible so interminable the rapidtransit of dissolving unmentionableturns of phrase that get us allworked up but are still workablecircuit of the week is interminablethis is so unknowable the rateof real-time soft-core rentablesyour choice of things to work throughthat weigh in as easy as predictionthe light in the east growing overgrass succumbs to clockworkclogging in the artery the trafficreport is vague and very porouspoor commuters coming out of carsare reaching destinations dream-like,determined, mining deficit and citingthe city’s dents and creases readyto please and sincere as street cleaningonce the aspect of slow swinging vast stacking the brick or the next ideathat eats things to gives you sucheasy leverage in this age of gorgeous rummaging. run the manageable numbersin time to find the light lessenthis session like all good fissionhas come to an end that glistensin lists of minutes singed soI clearly contain contaminated and missing simple misfit love and I, too, can’t have less thanthorough understanding pinpoint good as it goes or good while itpours the mold to make the worldfor septic response being sized up

But I stand and cite instances of my own certainty to seem stable. Moving on, the easier turns intoa comfortable careening towardsthe next season and pleases othersunceasingly. I’m undefeatable."